Brightcon 2026, hackathon and courses

Railway infrastructure operators manage assets with lifespans of 30–50 years. Renewal and replacement decisions lock in cost and carbon trajectories for decades. Current software focuses either on operations or on cost planning, yet no tools are available to integrate Prospective LCA (pLCA) into decision-making and long-term planning. Current asset management platforms optimize decisions based on cost and technical condition. In contrast, Conventional LCA is typically commissioned separately, applied retrospectively, and built on static emissions factors that ignore how background systems, such as electricity grids, steel, and cement production, will evolve over the coming decades. This gap is not trivial. The CO₂ intensity of steel and cement is projected to vary by up to 80% between today and 2050, depending on decarbonization pathways. In a preliminary analysis, under a <2°C scenario, a single railway switch replacement deferred by five years can avoid approximately one tonne of CO₂-eq, an effect that conventional LCA cannot capture. This contribution presents the needs assessment and literature framing that underlie the FORMA project (Future Oriented Multi-criteria Assessment of Railway Asset Management), an Innosuisse-funded collaboration among EuroTube Foundation, IMDM SA, and Schweizerische Südostbahn. Drawing on a review of current asset management platforms, prospective LCA methodology to define circular economy and environmental metrics for long-lived infrastructure, we identify three structural gaps: (1) no existing strategic asset management solution integrates environmental and circularity performance into long-term scenario planning at portfolio scale; (2) pLCA methods remain largely unexplored in railway infrastructure decision-making; and (3) circularity and sustainability indicators identified in the literature are fragmented, data-intensive, and not designed for assets with decades-long service lives. The project addresses these gaps by linking three currently disconnected domains: large-scale asset optimization tools, pLCA aligned with IPCC climate scenarios, and novel metrics calibrated for long-lived infrastructure. This contribution highlights a real-world domain where pLCA can move beyond research contexts into operational decision-making. We will present the initial findings of the literature review and the proposed methodological approach to address the identified gaps.